#I've been listening a lot to a podcast lately about Alex Jones and alt right nutcases

[oops-prow-did-it-again]

So, I've seen a few people in the notes trying to shrug this off as "these people don't know exactly what they're saying," and while I get the knee-jerk reaction is to assume that people can't be that evil, I cannot stress enough that Donald Trump has appeared on InfoWars before, years ago. This is not NEW for him in any regard.

Alex Jones has also, on his show, claimed that Democrats, Jews, and various other people are inhuman things masquerading as people. Gremlin-wraiths, Renfields, vampires - it sounds like complete lunacy, and IT IS, but you have to recognize that while on the surface it sounds like complete bullshit and like nobody can be stupid enough to believe it, it isn't designed to be necessarily believable. It's designed to sink hooks into people that are already on that fringe line and designed to dehumanize groups of people. You can call Democrats and Jews and Black people and queer people something as emphatically meaningless as "gremlin-wraiths" because that word doesn't have to mean anything. It just has to mean "not human."

Also, on the vaccine thing - the far right wingnuts have been screeching for years that it is a poison shot and that it's killing millions. The people who were told this didn't fact-check it, they just took that news at face value, and were manipulated to believe that the death count they saw from COVID was in part DUE to the vaccine, not because of COVID itself. This also feeds into the dehumanization of (mostly Jews, admittedly) other people, because they believe that this was a concerted effort by their enemies (or, in specifically Alex Jones' alt right nutcase circles, the "New World Order") to kill off their opponents.

I know I'm bringing up specifically Alex Jones-flavored talking points to the discussion of alt-right nuttery, but that's because, despite the financial bashing he (rightfully) took as a result of the Sandy Hook suits, and how even most alt right whackos will talk about him like he's a joke, he and his goddamned show InfoWars hugely helped spearhead this bullshit.

People like those that dedicatedly watch Alex Jones' show have been steadily primed to believe that they are constantly under threat, that their enemies are trying to actively wrench away their freedoms and have been actively trying to kill them either through poisonous vaccine shots or through poisoned waters, that the people who do so are not human, and that it is up to them to instate people they can trust to power and to take matters into their own hands if need be via the second amendment (i.e., shoot and kill people).

These people live on another fucking planet, quite frankly, where they think the world is somehow out to get them and that they have to fucking shoot-em-up style blast their way into keeping their freedom. They have tons of dogwhistles. Even if it sounds insanely weird or over-the-top or bizarre to you, chances are, it probably means something to them, and while it's fun to make jokes about how chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay, it's good to do research and realize that that is actually still antisemitic as hell and being used to prime people to think they are under attack and that their life is in danger, for profit and for political gain.

this shouldnt be the funniest thing in the world to me but here we are